Football is a simple game. Not simple to explain. It’s impossible to explain. Anyone with a passing interest in the NFL has the tactical wherewithal to be the best bridge player in the world. It’s that complicated.

But it’s simple to win — you draft yourself a decent young quarterback. And you’re done.

You look at the best teams going into the first weekend of the season, and that is what unites them. Seattle (Russell Wilson), Atlanta (Matt Ryan), San Francisco (Colin Kaepernick), Denver (Methuselah), et al.

More importantly, you look down the list of the league’s weaklings and they’re all casting about for anyone with three bendable limbs and the willingness to sign an injury waiver.

This is a function of the hegemonic hold football now has on the American athletic imagination. If you live in ’Murika, and have any physical talent at all, you play football. If you have nervous parents, you play baseball. If you are so tall you will snap when hit amidships, you play basketball. If you are so small that “amidships” is head height, you play soccer. And if you are an oddball, you play hockey.

There are so many incredibly fast, ball-catching, man-deking, spine-pulverizing young athletes across the mainland states, they are interchangeable. The second running back on any NFL team’s depth chart is probably the best football player of all time if he got out of college in the 1940s.

Quarterback remains the Alcatraz of the NFL. Doesn’t matter how well you swim, only a few have the smarts to get off it. Peyton Manning pretty much showed how that works kicking the season off on Thursday night, in which he made the defending Super Bowl champion Baltimore Ravens look like what we expect from the Buffalo Bills in a 49-27 rout.

It’s a wonder a team like the Bills doesn’t spend every single pick on quarterbacks. They could float the rest of the team on free-agent rookies and pray that one of the guys they’ve picked was hung over the day the pro scouts came to his school.

It’s a bad plan. Looking at how the Bills are fitted out using the conventional wisdom, it’s pure genius.

With that in mind, let’s address the coming season in Don Rumsfeld terms — known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns. (Lie down for a bit. You’re probably dizzy, too.)

Known knowns

The Bills are bad, but not as bad as the Jets.

Rex Ryan isn’t dieting. That’s despair eating away at him. Since around the time Mark Sanchez was knocking himself senseless running into a a teammate’s butt, the New York Jets have hit the skids and continue to butter up. The emblematic moment in the pre-season arrived when Sanchez (now so weighed down by expectation he’s developed sympathetic scoliosis) was injured in the fourth quarter of an exhibition game. Why is your best passer playing in the fourth quarter of a meaningless contest? Because this — da-da da-da — this is the Jets!

A few weeks ago, Ryan joked that he would be out of a job if the Jets were in the running for the consensus first-overall pick in next year’s draft, DL Jadeveon Clowney. Good news, Jets fans. You’re getting Clowney.

You like the Seahawks. You’ve always liked the Seahawks. Even when they were terrible, and you really didn’t like them, you secretly liked them. Practise saying it in the mirror.

This is a team that cannot be beaten at home. A team that fielded the best QB in football over the final third of last season. They have a ball-carrying beast in Marshawn Lynch; far and away the best defensive backfield in the NFL; a defensive front much improved through free agency. The only potential weakness (and we’re talking “averagely good” rather than “actually bad”) is the receiving corps. That group will take a qualitative leap once WR Percy Harvin returns from a torn labrum in November or December.

Known unknowns

Who’s your sleeper team?

A bunch of contenders here — the Rams, the Cardinals, the Chip Kellys — but as foretold in the ancient texts, “. . . You will know him by the ease of his schedule.”

The Kansas City Chiefs got better in two crucial areas over the off-season: coach (Andy Reid) and QB (Alex Smith). Smith is that notorious stereotype: The Man With Something to Prove to Everyone (Except His Accountant). He’s such a huge upgrade at pivot, the SEC should consider investigating this trade.

But the really good news for the Chiefs is the opposition. They share a division with two remora franchises in San Diego and Oakland. They have three other games against rebuilding teams in Buffalo, Jacksonville and Cleveland. Win those gimmes, and you’re only two wins out of the other nine games from the playoffs.

Who is going to have a public mid-season freakout?

Now we’re talking.

Well, we know someone on the Cowboys will lose it in front of a camera bank at some point. Probably five minutes before kickoff on Sunday. Dallas is that creepy ex-girlfriend your brother probably shouldn’t have invited to his wedding, just to be nice. She’s guaranteed to end up in a puddle of tears when the vows start. The smart money’s on Jerry Jones. Or Dez Bryant. Or Jerry Jones on Dez Bryant.

New Bills coach Doug Marrone has already squeezed in a pre-season meltdown when someone had the cheek to ask him when Mario Williams was going to be fully fit. We don’t ask for ourselves, Doug. We ask for Vegas. We know that the most reliable audience for sportswriting is your average degenerate gambler.

But most of all, we like Sanchez. He’s been absorbing shots like an unemployed dockworker for years now. Jets owner Woody Johnson has apparently decided to make an example of him. He must suffer for the $8 million he’ll make this year. Eventually, Sanchez is going to shave his head in the middle of a post-game press conference. We applaud his bravery in advance.

Unknown unknowns

Is the Read-Option still, like, a thing?

Oh, it’s a thing. Colin Kaepernick decided to take a breather for the first half of the Super Bowl, and he still almost won a championship. So it’s a thing.

The problem with defending the Read-Option (confusingly simplified version: wherein the quarterback keys on an isolated, unblocked defender, before deciding whether to run, hand off to his RB or throw downfield) is that the pitchers are ahead of the hitters.

The NFL is suddenly awash in young quarterbacking talent that has the athleticism and the intelligence to untangle this strategy. Defences haven’t yet caught up. They are staffed either by slow-moving brutes on the line (who can’t chase anyone down) or spindly defensive backs designed for downfield coverage (who can’t move up to make the open-field tackle).

Twenty years ago, the arrival of the dead-eye pocket passer and the introduction of the spread offence caused a change in the philosophy of defensive personnel. Until they adjust again, teams with the correct man behind centre will continue to take advantage of the new disparity.

Should we still care about Tim Tebow?

You should, if only for reasons of national pride. Once he was cut by the Patriots, a grim litany of pieces began appearing in the Stateside press. Here’s one from The Sporting News: “Tim Tebow’s NFL dream called unrealistic; Canada touted as option.”

Yes, “touted.” The same way the rest of the village “touts” the ice floe after you’ve sprained your ankle.

Tebow is not an NFL quarterback, but over three seasons of unreasonable scrutiny, he has yet to blow a personality tire in public. That’s superhuman restraint. Knowing they will get a lot of press and sell a lot of jerseys, someone (maybe even the Patriots) will take a mid-season flier on him.

However much you hate the hype, admit that you admire the man behind it. It would be great if he stuck it to his critics. But Tim, just be sure you don’t try to throw it at them when you’re sticking it in. That’s not going to work. You need to get up close and hand off the sticking.

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